Wednesday, November 17, 2010

At Left- One of the premiere finds during the Prog hunt since the beginning of the old "Bad Prog" shows and now the search for genius and greatness that is RA's very reason for existence- ladies and gentlemen, Copenhagen's own Tomrerclaus. Great record overall, but the amplified cello of "Cellokarma" with all the feedback and such...genius. Just pure Psycho-Psych genius.

Ah yes, so now in part of catching up the famed RA blog, DJ Timothy can not only talk about all the great music we played last Saturday night, but also share some of the details of his harrowing cross-country train excursion from Seattle to Brooklyn, NY replete with incredibly shitty food, rude Amtrak attendants, desperate days in need of a shave and one highly entertaining drunken evening with a Neo-Nazi and his "service" dog, a pit bull puppy named Billy. And its all true friends- all true. (Billy was actually much more like the second link than the first; after all, he's just a puppy and he's still learning. But the first link was just so bad-ass, I had to include it here. Billy actually spent most of his time asleep or begging his owner for treats, or wanting me to scratch him behind the ears.)

So, the deal is that I am temporarily broadcasting from the ultra-opulent and mega-modern studios of DJ Micah here in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn, NY. The "RA Over BK" phase of my Prog Empire is now being launched, and fans of the program can expect many big things to come in the following months. With luck, RA will pitch its tent here in the pork products capitol of the world and soon establish hegemony over the dutchbag Indie rock which owns this town and is in need of a damned good whacking. But first, about that Nazi and his pit bull.

You have very little control of who ends up on your car when you travel by train; I've done the Amtrak all the way across America several times now, and while it is very enjoyable, there are always some inconveniences that must be dealt with, namely, the absolutely horrible food available and the fact that sometimes you end up in conversations against your will with insane strangers who just love train travel. In this case, however, I can't exactly say I was displeased with my Nazi travelling companion's company. Being white, of course he was cool with me, and you know, the kind of guy who would have N-A-Z-I tattooed across his knuckles always has some kind of story that is worth hearing- you just don't end up a Neo-Nazi with a doctor-prescribed stress relief pit bull for nothing, I tell you that.

Everything was fine with this guy (I won't mention his name, he's got enough problems) until we got to Chicago and had a four-hour lay-over. This left a lot of time to kill, which NN filled by having a few beers (I did the same thing) and then buying a sixer of Old Style and a pint of nasty Canadian whiskey which he smuggled on board. I needed that after three days of enforced sobriety, and as I said, NN was very entertaining, regaling me with tales of his various imprisonments, a really nifty 9/11 conspiracy I hadn't heard before, theories on pit-bull raising ("They're actually victims of dog racism") and ever-so-many wonderful flights athwart convention, reality, and The Jews. All this is fine by me; it's just some guy talking, and I treat all of these encounters like an ongoing interview with the flip-side of rational thought and unconventional living; DJ Timothy is very hard to offend, because the more likely a person is to be insane, the more likely I am to find him all the more amusing.

We killed that pint of whiskey in about 45 minutes, though, and that with the Old Styles and all the other was enough to have just about anyone loaded. Now, to repeat: I find this incredibly amusing, on a train in the middle of Indiana at 3 a.m., with a post-traumatically stressed Neo-Nazi, his pit bull "service dog", and both of us drunk. It was then that- literally out of nowhere- a diatribe commenced about Somalis (wow, NNreally doesn't like Somalis, I'll tell you that) and I had to call things off for the night before this cat got me kicked off of the train. At one point- and I swear to you this is true- poor Billy put his little pit bull puppy head on my lap from underneath the lounge car table, and just looked at me with these big, despairing and disconsolate eyes; like, "He gets like this some times. It really upsets me, too. Please scratch me behind the ears." Further incident was avoided, but I awoke the next morning with a throbbing hang-over, and that's no fun on a moving train going through the wastes of Ohio. Anyway, I made it, am loving the weather and all the old sights of BKLYN and especially the fattening-up I'm undergoing here and that's about all I have to say this week.

Oh yeah- there was a show Saturday night. If you'd like to see the playlist, it's below, and I promise next week I'll return to the established form of actually writing about the music I played that week. - TKR

DJ Timothy apologizes for being so dilatory regarding his posts on this blog; really, he does. It's just that I have been very, very busy for the past two weeks coming all the way from Seattle to Brooklyn and have been spending so much time with DJ Micah of Public Sensonry Radio that I simply have not had time to devote the usual 10 to 15 hours a week I do in making Radio Anthrocide the BEST PROGRESSIVE ROCK RADIO SHOW IN THE WORLD. But I'm staying in tonight, drinking some of DJ Micah's herbal teas, and settling down to the heady business of catching up the RA blog.

First of all, though- let's be honest. RA#25 was a TRAINWRECK.Almost as if Seattle had to kick me in the ass on the way out the door, a show I have worked on for weeks ended up with all kinds of technical problems due to the unbelievably shitty Internet connections available at coffee shops in the nation's most "wired" city (whatever, dude). There was so much skipping and fade out that, to be honest, this is going to be the very first RA where DJ Timothy demands a "do-over", since I have really come to love this kind of Electronic insanity and am listening to Minimal Electro and such constantly; give me a few weeks to purge my bile, and we'll be back with a PROPER upload capacity and you'll get to hear all of this great, weird, hyper-intellectual music in full.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

At Left, a scene from the witchcraft masterpiece Haxan, made in- yes- 1922. If you've never seen it...well, you've never seen anything like it, I assure you. An amazing film, perfectly horrible and scary.

Baphomet willing, I shall be doing this again next year, but it will take quite a bit of doing to make the Second Annual HST on RA as exciting and amazing as the first- if I do say so my own damn self. What more could you possibly have wanted in a night of terrifying music and aural mayhem? For one, of course, there was the WORLD BLOODY PREMIERE of the first new song from Black Widow in 40 years- the rollicking and riotous "Hail Satan", from the forthcoming Sleeping With Demons. As part of the festivities, RA welcomed its very first studio guest, the Widow's own Clive Jones, who regaled us with many stories and generally was a good sport about working with an interviewer who is still, really, getting an idea of how to do these things, whilst simultaneously acting as sound engineer,DJ, and trying to get fucking Skype to work and not blow up in the middle of the most important fucking Internet conversation I've ever had.

Of course, it would not be an RA without some kind of glitch. DJ Timothy would like to apologize for the brief flutter of clusterfuckedness which occured during Clive's second segment, which has been polished up as best I could in the download link, below. This does nothing to rectify the fact that my neighbor was unable to hear my reading of Poe's The Raven, which I can only say doesn't it just bloody figure, but whatever- thanks to the Feedburner, this whole awesome avalanche of Halloween horror is forever available to all- and considering the amount of work that went into all of those soundbites and the twenty-five takes I went through with The Raven...I just don't want to think about it anymore, that's all I can say.

And as for the final segment...my meeting with the demon Akerial was frightful, indeed, but we managed to work things out over a beer and the sacrifice of these two goddamn birds that have lived at the end of the hall of my building for several years, and driven me nuts with their squawking. Baked into a pie, their protests have fallen silent under a flaky, buttery sepulchre and some really rich lobster mushroom gravy, with tarragon and sage, of course. They shall bedevil me...nevermore. Bon appetit, and HAIL SATAN!!! - TKR